Tell Us About All the Maddening Soft Sexism in Your Life
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If you are a working woman who has read anything about the Ellen Pao discrimination case, your reaction has likely been one of unease and disappointment. Turns out that soft sexism—something very real, likely something you’ve experienced personally—is a slippery thing to prove in a court of law. But that doesn’t mean we should stop talking about it.
To recap, Pao lost a gender discrimination suit last week (filed in 2010, and the four-week trial just wrapped in San Francisco) against her former employer, Kleiner Perkins Caufield and Byers, a Silicon Valley venture capital firm. In this suit, she alleged that, after filing a complaint about sexual harassment, that she was retaliated against for speaking up and held back from a rightful promotion. The jury disagreed. But as Ann Friedman notes in a piece at New York magazine about the case, it wasn’t because Pao did anything wrong. In fact, she went about things exactly as corporate practices dictated she should:
When one of her co-workers made unwanted sexual advances, she reported the behavior to her supervisor. She asked that her bosses bring in sexual-harassment educators and outsiders to investigate her claims. After experiencing what she felt was retaliation for her reporting the harassment — such as not being invited to certain events, or being poorly evaluated in a performance review — she sought the advice of an outside human-resources consultant. The consultant told her “she would not be successful at [Kleiner Perkins] because she complained and that going forward she should drop her complaints, because no one would do anything about them.” And so, when that prediction proved true, she filed a lawsuit. And then she was fired.
Pao’s loss in court happened because the sorts of things Pao accused the firm of fell under the gray zone of soft sexism, that ever-so-slightly tainted smudge of ball sweat on the lens of your career that has kept you out of meetings, decisions and promotions that at best you can only fantasize about, because they aren’t actually happening to you. It’s those moments in your working and personal life that are just nagging enough that you notice them and feel the burn of unfairness, but equally subtle enough that you can’t exactly prove it as sexism.
In a more recent piece at NYMag on the Pao case, Annie Lowrey recalls a recent avatar of soft sexism, who she calls Cocktail Party Guy. Lowrey writes:
It happens all the time when my husband and I are at work events together. Cocktail Party Guy asks my husband about how things are going at his news site, and he answers. Then Cocktail Party Guy asks me how our dogs are, and I answer, before pivoting the conversation back to work — and later rolling my eyes as we walk away. It is not impolite. It is not inappropriate. But it is still, at least in my mind, sexist. Both me and my husband love our work. Both me and my husband love our dogs. One of us gets asked about our work. One of us gets asked about our dogs.
It is a form of soft discrimination that I fear might be all too familiar to all too many women — and often I find it hard to explain to my male friends and colleagues. Occasionally, I even find myself struggling to convince them that it is discrimination, and that it has consequences.
In the Pao case, there were many examples of this kind of discrimination-or-not, Lowrey writes: